Hanoi
For those who grew up in the U.S. during the “Vietnam/American” War, the name alone is enough to conjure terrifying thoughts. What a surprise, then, to find a magnificently vibrant and friendly city. Temples lie in the midst of city lakes, walkways are lined with trees and in spite of the heavy traffic, mostly motorbike and mopeds, it is a walkable town. It was raining while we were there, which seems to be common during the winter months. It doesn’t snow, but is cold and wet for most of December – March, but this doesn’t upset the street vendors or musicians.
Hanoi was once the French capital of Indochina, which comprised Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, and many of the French influenced buildings have been renovated and restored. According to the guidebook, the Opera House was built to imitate the Paris Opera, and while I did not really see a resemblance to the ornate Garnier original, the house has a distinctly European atmosphere. The opera house is located down the street from a series of modern malls and the Ho Hoan Keim Lake with its Ngoc Son Temple dedicated to an early 14th c general and national hero, Tran Hung Dao. The general, who defeated the Mongols, has been deified. It is common in China and throughout SE Asia to raise people to the ranks of the gods after they die and this is only one instance of that practice. While we toured the temple, people were lining up to pray and offer joss sticks of incense in front of the image of the hero. This lake is also famous for its tortoise legend. Since the 15th C the Ho Guom tortoises have supposedly kept the royal and sacred sword of the city for protection. The sword is said to have appeared from the depths a number of times, only to have the lake’s tortoise quickly disappear with it again because people are not yet worthy enough to keep it themselves. The name of the lake means Lake of the Sword Restored, and there is a display of a giant tortoise near the General’s Temple.
Hanoi has a number of interesting museums, including the National Museum, which is split into two buildings a few blocks from each other. The site closest to the Red River houses the ancient artifacts up to the 19th C, and the building closer to the Opera House has the more modern collection. The ancient artifacts include nice collections of Cham Art as well as Buddhist art. Perhaps the most interesting museum in town, though, is the Women’s Museum, which has three main sections: Women in Family, Women in History, and Women’s Fashion. These are further subdivided by ethnic group so that it is easy to see the differences in regional style and culture, including those which are matriarchal vs. those that are patriarchal. It was interesting to note the similarities in the Northern Vietnam matriarchal societies and that of the Musuo on Lugu Lake in Sichuan and Yunnan provinces. The connection with Yunnan ethnic groups seems to have been quite strong. While we were touring the museum there was a special exhibit on Mother Goddess worship in Vietnam, which was fascinating. It included descriptions of some of the rituals and dances involved in her worship and the costumes the participants wear to ‘become’ the deities and figures involved in the rituals.
The Mother Goddess has been worshipped in Vietnam since Neolithic times and she remains a presence in the psyche of the people in some rural areas and even the capital today. One of the plaques in the exhibit from people’s comments read: People always worship Mother Goddess as their own Mother. We are all children and grandchildren under the Mother Goddess. Whenever I think of the Mother, I visit her temple to ask for good fortune, good health and favorable business.”
Hanoi was made the first capital of the region in 1010 by Emperor Ly Thai To, who named it Thang Long (City of the Soaring Dragon). The capital was moved to Hue by the first emperor of the Nguyen dynasty in 1802. In 1831 the city was renamed Hanoi, “the City on the Bend of the River” by Nguyen Emperor Tu Duc. It became the official capital of Vietnam after the August Revolution of 1945 against the French, and has remained so after the 1950s-60s war. Saigon, the traditional name for the capital city in the south, was renamed Ho Chi Minh in honor of the revolutionary from Hanoi who many of the people in the South had fought against. Today there is still a fair amount of difference between the two parts of the country, which comes out in the different cuisines, styles of dress, and general attitude toward life. Hanoi, is a stately lively cultural city, while Ho Chi Minh is an enterprising economically booming hub of youthful activity.
As fascinating as Hanoi is, some of the best sites in the region lie outside of town. About two hours away is the Perfume Pagoda on the same Perfume River that flows through Hue. On the drive to the boat dock, one passes fields and fields of rice paddies, many of them dotted with tombs in the middle of the paddy. It seems that it is common in North Vietnam to house the deceased ancestors in a tomb in the middle of the family rice plots. As we drove by we saw people stooped over planting rice shoots and cultivating the water-soaked fields. In the North, they average two crops per year, while they may get three in the South. The plots are divided by family and each adult member in the village is allotted a plot that is about 20x40ft to cultivate. People of all ages were hard at work in the drizzling rain in their fields. After witnessing the effort that is expended to produce rice, which they use for personal consumption as well as for sale, it was good to see that the Perfume Pagoda Temple and the river trip there as well as the one to the Trang An Caves were primarily visited by locals. After about an hour and a half on the bus, one is dropped off at the boat dock for a river trip in a small ca.2- 4 person rowboat to the site of the Temple. After disembarking amid kilometers of vendors selling food and souvenirs, one starts to climb the stairs to the cave entrance on the hill. It’s a decent climb and workout to get up to the top, and once there one descends down a staircase filled with pilgrims, some of whom cheated and took the cable car up, to the temple itself. Inside are a number of shrines and at the very back of the cave a large altar with a number of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas and Kuan Yins surrounded by thousands of flowers and offering bowls. The Mother Goddess is worshipped here as well, as the water that flows through the cracks in the rock are said to be the milk of the Mother.
Another more modern temple outside Hanoi is the Binh Dinh complex which is being built on a hill not far from the Trang An river caves. The Binh Dinh complex is still under construction but already houses a number of very large bronze Buddhas and 500 stone Arhants. There is also a fairly huge Laughing Buddha gracing the hilltop above the main temple on a plateau. The square in front of the temple is quite big, about half the size of Tiananmen in Beijing. There is an overall sense of spaciousness and grandeur to the site and is already, I believe, the largest Buddhist site in Vietnam. Nearby are the Trang An caves, which are small river caves that one traverses in a small rowboat. The karst hills covered with rich lush multi-green hued vegetation offset by the clear river water and the stark rock creates stunning scenery and despite the perennial rain, makes one glad that digital cameras exist. It would be far too expensive to develop all the film from the pictures we shot.
The Trang An Caves landscape is a modified version of that of Halong Bay, which is a good five-hour drive from the capital city. Halong Bay has over 2000 islands in the middle of the “emerald waters of the Gulf of Tonkin.” It was designated a World Heritage site in 1994. Halong translates as the place “where the dragon descends into the sea” and legends claim the islands were formed by a great dragon from the mountains. As it charged towards the coast, its flailing tail gouged out valleys and crevasses. When it finally plunged into the sea, the area filled with water, leaving only the pinnacles visible. (LP 94)
There are a few standard tourist options for visiting the Bay, one is to go on a long day trip from Hanoi, but that allows only about two hours on the water, another is a two day trip spending the one night on a boat, and the third is a three day - two night option with one (or two) night(s) on the boat and the second on an island. The latter is the one we chose and were glad we did. This allowed us the time to see Surprise Cave, which is quite large, well lit, and natural, i.e., not a temple site, to go kayaking amid some of the floating villages, and to get to Cat Bay Island. The kayaking was great, but I was surprised by the amount of trash and refuse that was floating everywhere. It was truly sad to see this beautiful area mired with garbage. And the mess wasn’t just around the floating villages, but throughout the whole sea region. Even on our isolated island, plastic and tin cans float around the pilings supporting the boardwalk to shore. The boardwalk is on stilt pilings to accommodate the sizable fluctuations in tidal movement. Our stilted cabin, for example, was about 100 ft from the shoreline when we arrived in the afternoon, but during the night the waters lapped underneath the floorboards and the boardwalk was almost submerged. Away from the shoreline, Cat Bay Island is beautiful, with a very nice national park for hiking, biking and birding.
The Halong Bay excursion was an interesting mix of stunning natural beauty and stinky ugly trash. As Hanoi and the Bay have a vested interest in maintaining and increasing tourism, the authorities will need to deal with the pollution problem fairly soon. The mess that we humans create and leave behind can be truly awful.
